Your metabolic rate is a critical factor for managing your body weight and composition.

Therefore, it’s important to understand your metabolism in order to diet effectively.

With this RMR calculator, you will find out how many calories you should eat to burn fat and build muscle.

What is RMR (resting metabolic rate)?

Resting metabolic rate is a measure of the energy you expend without physical activity. In other words, it’s the number of calories your body burns when you lay on the couch all day.

BMR vs RMR

BMR (basal metabolic rate) is often used interchangeably with RMR. The only difference is that RMR has stricter requirements when measured in the lab. For our purposes, the calculation is the same.

How to Calculate Your Resting Metabolic Rate

There are several different equations for calculating RMR.

By far the most common is the Harris-Benedict equation. This formula uses your gender, height, weight, and age to predict RMR.

Harris-Benedict Equation

Male: 66.47 + (6.25 x weight in lbs) + (12.71 x height in inches) – (6.755 x age)

Female: 655.1 + (4.347 x weight in lbs) + (4.07 x height in inches) – (4.676 x age)

Another way to find RMR is the Katch-McArdle equation. It uses only your lean body mass.

Katch-McArdle Equation

370 + ( 9.818 x lean mass in lbs)

Which Equation is More Accurate?

Despite being much simpler, the Katch-McArdle equation is almost always more accurate. The reason is that it’s based on the amount of muscle you have.

You see, muscle mass has the biggest effect on your metabolism. So my RMR calculator uses a modified Katch-McArdle equation to find your resting metabolic rate.

What is a “Normal” RMR?

In the last few months, more than 8,000 people have used my RMR calculator. So I plotted all that data to show you the normal distribution.

More than 5,700 women completed the calculator with RMR ranging from 882 to 1,997 calories.

For women the average RMR was 1,340 calories.

Not as many men completed the RMR calculator. But male RMR covered a broader spectrum, ranging from 1,067 to 2,669 calories.

For men the average RMR was 1,806 calories.

Keep in mind RMR is based primarily on your body mass. So if you don’t fall in the middle of the bell curve, that’s okay.

However, a faster metabolism is desirable if you want to burn more calories and fat. So how do you increase your RMR?

How to Increase Your RMR

There are two ways to increase your metabolic rate. First, you can increase your lean body mass. And second, you can gradually eat more calories.

Increase Your Lean Body Mass

In order to add muscle mass, you need to combine intense resistance training with enough food.

Of course, you don’t want to go too high on calories either. Otherwise, you’ll gain unwanted body fat.

How Many Calories for Muscle Gain?

Gradually Eat More Calories

Another way to increase RMR is slowly increasing the amount of calories you eat.

Also referred to as reverse dieting in the bodybuilding community. This approach is often used after a long diet in order to rebuild metabolism.

How to Use Reverse Dieting

How Many Calories Should You Eat?

Most likely, finding out how many calories you should eat is the reason you want to know RMR.

In addition to metabolism, you need to know how many calories you burn through activity. The combination of metabolic rate and physical activity is called TDEE (total daily energy expenditure).

How to Calculate Total Daily Energy Expenditure

Furthermore, TDEE tells you how many calories you need to eat to maintain your weight. From there you can adjust calories up or down depending on your fitness goal.